1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of graphical user interfaces and more particularly to the manipulation of a check list in a graphical user interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
The conventional graphical user interface (GUI) has been widely used for many years. The primary function of the GUI includes providing visual controls with which the end-user can interact with an underlying software application. Though the common GUI includes many stock visual controls, a select few visual controls can be combined to accommodate most computer-human interactions required by a software application.
For example, the static text box control can be used to present text to the end-user while an edit box can permit the user to provide textual input to the software application. A radio button control can provide for the exclusive selection of an element from among a field of elements, while a checklist box can provide for the non-exclusive selection of elements from among a field of elements. Notably, many visual controls can be combined to produce a composite visual control.
It is common for software applications to display multiple choice data and corresponding selections among the multiple choice data using radio buttons, check boxes or list boxes. Sometimes, however, a software application may need to display dynamically changing groups of multiple choice data and corresponding selections. In the latter circumstance, end users must be able to insert groups of choices, remove groups of choices, and edit choices within a group. Yet, the number of groups provided may also be large thereby requiring a scrolling mechanism enabling the user to see all of the groups.
In text-to-speech software applications, the problem of grouping multiple choices in a GUI can be particularly acute. Specifically, before building Concatenative Text-to-Speech (CTTS) Voice, which is a database containing pre-recorded segments of natural speech and used for concatenative synthesis, a pronunciation dictionary can be created containing all words from a training script. Yet, there may be multiple entries for a given word in the dictionary since words may have more than one pronunciation, e.g. “read” may be pronounced as “reed” or “red”. The CTTS Voice building process typically can include a step where word pronunciations can be aligned to corresponding recordings. Accordingly, where multiple entries exist for a word, the closest matching word can be selected.
Unfortunately, the foregoing process is not always accurate and can require a manual override of the automated selection of a closest matching word. Thus, a highly desirable application to correct the selections made by the system would:
1) display all the words in a training script sentence
2) display all possible pronunciations for each word
3) display the automatically selected pronunciations for each word
4) enable user to select a different pronunciation
5) add a new pronunciation
6) delete invalid pronunciations
7) add a new word to the sentence (e.g. speaker unintentionally recorded an extra word)
8) delete a word from the sentence (e.g. speaker skipped a word in the recording)
Presently, it is common practice to use standard radio buttons and group controls to display multi-choice data and the current selection. However, it is very difficult to dynamically change, add and remove those controls from a grouping along with the data associated with the controls.